1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a printing apparatus which performs environment-friendly printing which takes the environment into consideration, a printing control apparatus, a printing control method and a printing control program.
2. Related Art
In recent years, in order to reduce the load on the global environment, there has been demand for a printing apparatus such as a printer or a multifunction machine which has a function of environment-friendly printing (hereinafter, referred to as “eco-printing”) which takes the environment into consideration. As an example of environment-friendly printing, there have been known energy-saving printing which suppresses power consumption during printing or standby, printing using recording materials with a low environmental load, such as an ink that is produced using soybeans as a raw material, printing which suppresses the environmental load of the printing medium, such as the use of recycled paper or layout printing, and the like.
In addition, it is necessary to have more users use an environment-friendly printing function to further exhibit an effect of reducing the environmental load using the environment-friendly printing mentioned above.
Therefore, in JP-A-2007-283719, there is disclosed a printing apparatus which reads out data from an IC tag provided in environment-friendly consumable goods, judges from the read-out data, and prints a logo when printing using environment-friendly consumable goods. This informs a user that the printed matter that is a printing result is printed using environment-friendly consumable goods, and thereby improving the user's consciousness of environmental measures.
However, in the technology described in JPA-2007-283719, even if printing is not environment-friendly printing, there is a possibility to print the logo by mistake. For example, after consuming an environment-friendly recording material such as a toner cartridge, when the user refills the toner cartridge with new recording material and reuses the environment-friendly consumable goods, the logo is printed even though the recharged recording material is not environment-friendly recording material, but rather a normal recording material. Therefore, there is a problem in that the user who sees the printed matter that is the printing result mistakes the printed matter for a result of environment-friendly printing, even in a case where the printed matter is not actually a result of environment-friendly printing.